[Jim Lesurf[_3_]]

In article , Scott Dorsey
wrote:
However in some quiet passages the result became quite 'ragged'. I
finally realised that the encoder judgement rule settings was treating
a lot of the low level detail as 'noise floor' simply because it wasn't
fully taking into account the overall low sound level.

This is adjustable! You can set some of those thresholds down manually
when necessary.. And yes, for classical music it's necessary.

Understood and agreed. The surprise was that it actually was allowed to
happen when the encoding was being done by professionals.

So not all mp3 files are equal, even when at the same mp3 rate.

This is why we pay mastering engineers. It's just like cutting LPs, you
are trying to pack 10 gallons of music in a 5 gallon container.
Something has to be thrown away. It's better for a person with ears to
help make the decision about what instead of letting the computer do it.
--scott

Again, agreed. But again, a reason why some LPs sound rather poorer than
others, even when coming from professionals.

The advantage of LPCM - flac is that no such judgements are needed.

Jim

--
Electronics https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
biog http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/history/ups_and_downs.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

[Trevor]

On 8/01/2020 4:04 am, Jim Lesurf wrote:

Again, agreed. But again, a reason why some LPs sound rather poorer than
others, even when coming from professionals.

So you are saying not all professionals are equal. What a radical
thought! :-) :-)

[Jim Lesurf[_3_]]

In article , Trevor wrote:
On 8/01/2020 4:04 am, Jim Lesurf wrote:

Again, agreed. But again, a reason why some LPs sound rather poorer
than others, even when coming from professionals.

So you are saying not all professionals are equal. What a radical
thought! :-) :-)

Well, I've only ever been a 'professional' wrt the 'user end' of the flow.
Thus I can only judge those 'upstream' on the diversity of the results we
get. :-)

Jim

--
Electronics https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
biog http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/history/ups_and_downs.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

[Don Pearce[_3_]]

On Tue, 07 Jan 2020 17:04:46 +0000 (GMT), Jim Lesurf
wrote:

In article , Scott Dorsey
wrote:
However in some quiet passages the result became quite 'ragged'. I
finally realised that the encoder judgement rule settings was treating
a lot of the low level detail as 'noise floor' simply because it wasn't
fully taking into account the overall low sound level.

This is adjustable! You can set some of those thresholds down manually
when necessary.. And yes, for classical music it's necessary.

Understood and agreed. The surprise was that it actually was allowed to
happen when the encoding was being done by professionals.

So not all mp3 files are equal, even when at the same mp3 rate.

This is why we pay mastering engineers. It's just like cutting LPs, you
are trying to pack 10 gallons of music in a 5 gallon container.
Something has to be thrown away. It's better for a person with ears to
help make the decision about what instead of letting the computer do it.
--scott

Again, agreed. But again, a reason why some LPs sound rather poorer than
others, even when coming from professionals.

The advantage of LPCM - flac is that no such judgements are needed.

Jim

Well, I've just been having fun with MP3s. I drive a lot, so I keep
myself occupied with audio books. In my new car I found that some
played and others wouldn't. Long story short - there was a maximum
amount of metadata my car player could deal with before it could no
longer read the file. So I just re-recorded everything minus metadata.

And - almost forgot - this only applied to sticks in the USB socket.
MP3s on CD ROM play with all the metadata present.

d

[Scott Dorsey]

Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , Scott Dorsey
This is why we pay mastering engineers. It's just like cutting LPs, you
are trying to pack 10 gallons of music in a 5 gallon container.
Something has to be thrown away. It's better for a person with ears to
help make the decision about what instead of letting the computer do it.

Again, agreed. But again, a reason why some LPs sound rather poorer than
others, even when coming from professionals.

When I was starting out, I was cutting 45s... and I was cutting 25 to 30
sides a day... so you can believe that not a lot of care and attention was
being paid on each one. With something like lacquer cutting where you
really are having to make real compromises, it matters a lot about how
much time and care and listening is done. Professionals are sometimes
too expensive to have the time to do it right.

The advantage of LPCM - flac is that no such judgements are needed.

I don't really see a need for flac. For local storage, disks have become
so incredibly cheap that just keeping everything around as PCM files is
no problem. On the other hand, if you want to stream over the network,
nobody has clients to stream flac and you are stuck using the formats
that people can read (namely MP3 and RA).
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Jim Lesurf[_3_]]

In article , Scott Dorsey
wrote:
The advantage of LPCM - flac is that no such judgements are needed.

I don't really see a need for flac. For local storage, disks have
become so incredibly cheap that just keeping everything around as PCM
files is no problem. On the other hand, if you want to stream over the
network, nobody has clients to stream flac and you are stuck using the
formats that people can read (namely MP3 and RA).

Well, as a domestic user I find that my NAS is well over half full even
using flac (and aac for BBC material). And flac also helps when I use a DAP
that only has a couple of mini sd cards[1]. So it seems useful for me. No
doubt my next NAS will be larger... :-)

If I were working in a professional context, I'd probably agree with you,
though.

I 'stream' over my network using a net filing system. Works fine with the
players, etc, on all my Linux and RISC OS boxes. IIUC No need for a media
'client' in the sense you give above, just 'everything is a file'. :-) I'd
probably do the same in a pro situation *if* that was convenient. But
presume this would depend on the context of who else was doing what, and
what others required, etc.

However as per my earlier comment, apart from a few years designing home
audio equipment, my interest tends to be home/domestic audio.

Jim

[1] IIRC one card c400GB and the other 256GB.

--
Electronics https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
biog http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/history/ups_and_downs.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html